Sunday, March 12, 2017

Songs of Love and Death

Another big George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois anthology of short stories, this one doesn't feature a Song of Ice and Fire extra to draw in the crowds. However, there's still plenty in here to keep a reader entertained. There are quite a few creepy tales of being in love with a ghost or having a ghost in love with you, or in one extra creepy case, the ghost of an angry former love being super angry. Some stories are vignettes that add to an existing (Jacqueline Carey's story about the dying regrets of Anafiel Delaunay was an interesting enough introduction to that series that I'll follow up with some more of them). The only substandard entry was an awful Dresden Files story (the usual amount of awful for a Dresden Files story, nothing special). The Dresden files series seems to be uniformly misogynist and dreadful, and I'd skip them when reading anthologies, but then I'd feel annoyed that I hadn't finished the book.